by Laurie Stone
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Watch Right Here. Right Now. A Conversation with Laurie Stone.
Daisy Alioto reviews Everything Is Personal: Notes On Now in the Los Angeles Review of Books
Everything is Personal, Notes on Now is a collage of hybrid narratives that begin with the stunning events of November 2016 and challenge Stone, a longtime feminist and writer for the Village Voice, to feel good when everything is bad. Freely jumping between social commentary, criticism, memoir, and fiction, Stone reports on traveling to D.C. to bird-dog senators ahead of the hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, considers the pleasures and terrors of the #MeToo movement, reassesses the legacy of Valerie Solanas, and recalls the way that in 1968 the sense of power and hope made you feel it would always be 1968. The pieces are constructed the way dreams and films are: juxtaposing images, racing along with dolly shots, moving in for close-ups, and pulling back for a sweeping sense of time. Woven throughout are chunks from Stone’s Facebook posts that read like tender and funny postcards written to everyone from a time that is unimaginable, even as it’s being lived.
Introduction by Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick
Afterword by Marco Roth, founding editor, n+1
Praise for Everything Is Personal, Notes On Now
“Laurie Stone has been a powerful voice for decades, both in her cultural criticism and in her fiction. Everything is Personal: Notes on Now, is as strong and engaged (and often enraged) as you might imagine, a writer mustering all she’s got to take a deep dive into this difficult world. We are lucky to have her opinions, observations, and depth of feeling. More, please.”
—Meg Wolitzer, The Feminine Persuasion
“I can’t remember when I last read anything as alive, alert, self-questioning and independent-minded as Everything is Personal, whether in its quick glances at lovers, strangers, houses, movies, skies, or its extended montages on subjects such as Valerie Solanas or the cultural ramifications of #MeToo. It’s a wonderfully generous book too; magnanimous even in its wicked asperity, and above all a celebration of the physical and intellectual pleasures that make life worth living and battles worth fighting.”
— James Lasdun, The Fall Guy
“An extraordinary work, remarkably and unflinchingly true to its author’s powerful, instantly recognizable voice—full of wisdom and passion and fierce intelligence. For Laurie Stone, the world we live in now is personal—everything and everywhere in it is her and the immediate place of her being. There is great beauty in this brave book, right at the very heart of it.”
— Mikhail Iossel, Notes from Cyberground
“There are many excellent essays here, but the one I’m most excited by is ‘The Clock,’ which is admirably complicit, resistant to all manner of received wisdom, self-questioning, ferocious, and little short of revelatory. I am a besotted fan.”
— David Shields, Reality Hunger
“To read Laurie Stone’s Everything is Personal, Notes on Now is to read Laurie Stone, is to experience a present tense intimacy with a lusty, testy, ebullient, scintillating mind, a woman’s mind…”
— Diane Seuss, Four-Legged Girl
“Stone knows that in a world crowded with opinions, a thought can’t just be good, it has to be elegant. Her powerful sentences smile at their own precision, they don’t just make a social point but offer a model on how to think, how to think in this time.”
— Michael Tolkin, The Player
“Everything Is Personal is a galvanic account of our era, a trumpet blare aimed at sleepwalkers… A voice unlike any other, she’s a fearless thinker in an age submerged in fear.”
— Emily Nussbaum, I Like to Watch
“Stone is engaging, sharp, funny throughout these pages but no matter how far she ranges, she holds onto the recognition that daily life in the US is being lived under a dark cloud. She makes the stakes very clear. Her Notes on Now are completely illuminating.”
— Chris Kraus, I Love Dick, from the Introduction
Laurie is author most recently of My Life as an Animal, Stories. She was a longtime writer for the Village Voice, theater critic for The Nation, and critic-at-large on Fresh Air. She won the Nona Balakian prize in excellence in criticism from the National Book Critics Circle and two grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She has published numerous stories in such publications as N + 1, Waxwing, Tin House, Evergreen Review, Fence, Open City, Anderbo, The Collagist, Your impossible Voice, New Letters, TriQuarterly, Threepenny Review, and Creative Nonfiction. Her website is: lauriestonewriter.com.
